"The Behaving Preparation"

As of today, August 6, 2009, these are the projects using monkeys at UW-Madison receiving stimulus funds.

1R21MH086014-01
[F-18]MEFWAY PET TO MEASURE 5-HT1A RECEPTORS IN GENE X ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS CHRISTIAN, BRADLEY
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NIMH $181,745

3R01EY002698-30S1
ANTERIOR OCULAR SEGMENT PHYSIOLOGY AND PHARMACOLOGY
KAUFMAN, PAUL LEON
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NEI $7,425

1R01EY018567-01A1
AQUEOUS HUMOR DYNAMICS STUDIES IN VIVO AND IN VITRO
KAUFMAN, PAUL LEON
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NEI $360,267

3R24RR021745-04S1
IMMUNOGENETICS OF PRIMATES USED FOR BIOTERROR RESEARCH
OCONNOR, DAVID H
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NCRR $79,923

3R01DC003693-06S1
MULTISENSORY PROCESSING IN THE BEHAVING PREPARATION
POPULIN, LUIS C
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NIDCD $140,521

3R21HD057684-01A2S1
NEUROENDOCRINE CONTROL OF PATERNAL CARE IN THE COMMON MARMOSET
ZIEGLER, TONI ELAINE
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
2009 NICHD $11,189

In Visions of Caliban (Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall, Houghton Mifflin, 1993), Jane Goodall writes: "I have been allowed into the labs because those responsible have not truly understood the nature, the full horror, of the crime being committed. But times are changing." But Goodall was overly optimistic.

It seems that the vivisectors can be lumped into two stinking heaps. There are those who genuinely are blind to the issue, to the animals' suffering, and those who have come to recognize the crimes and who work to keep them secret and to spin the details and facts to keep the public confused and from storming the labs with torches and pitchforks. I think Luis C. Populin, who is one of those named above, must be a part of the first stinky heap. How else could someone refer to cats and monkeys as "preparations"?

MULTISENSORY PROCESSING IN THE BEHAVING PREPARATION

Abstract Text:
Note: This project is being supported with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which may involve a reduction in the research aims and scope. If necessary, a revised abstract will be posted soon and this notice removed.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to extend our knowledge of the neural mechanisms that underlie the integration of information from different sensory modalities and their transformation into motor commands to generate gaze shifts. Specifically, we will seek to establish the relationship between the magnitude and timing of sensory responses, associated motor discharges, and resulting gaze shifts. The proposed experiments, to be carried out in a newly developed head-unrestrained monkey preparation, are a natural continuation of those carried out in the behaving, head-restrained cat during the previous funding period. The change from the cat to the monkey preparation was dictated by the questions that arose from our previous work, which cannot be adequately addressed in the cat. The experimental approach will be to record from single units in the intermediate layers of the superior colliculus (SCi) of monkeys (1) during the presentation of acoustic, visual, and bimodal stimuli, and (2) while they orient to the sources of those stimuli. ...

Here's one of his big past discoveries:

Monkey Sound Localization: Head-Restrained versus Head-Unrestrained Orienting. The Journal of Neuroscience, September 20, 2006.:

Whereas the results support previous findings that monkeys localize sounds very poorly with their heads restrained, the data also reveal for the first time that monkeys localize sounds much more accurately and with less variability when their heads are allowed to move.
...
Materials and Methods
Subjects and surgery
Three young adult, male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) 5–8 kg in weight served as subjects. The animals were purchased from the Wisconsin Regional Primate Center (Madison, WI). All surgical and experimental procedures were approved by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Animal Care Committee and were in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.

Under aseptic conditions, eye coils and a head post were implanted in each monkey. The eye coils were constructed with stainless steel wire (SA632; Conner Wire, Chatsworth, CA), and were implanted according to the method developed by Judge et al. (1980). An additional coil of similar construction was embedded in the acrylic of the head cap, in the frontal aspect, to measure head movements. The head posts and the surgical screws used to attach the acrylic holding the implants to the skull were made of titanium. Because changes in the position of the external ears are known to affect the input to the eardrums (Young et al., 1996), much effort was invested in restoring the pinnae [outer ear] to their preimplant position.

And they call me a lunatic.

See too: Classic Evidence of Self-Awareness Not Sufficient to Deter UW-Madison Invasive Brain Experiments on Monkeys; Vivisectors Delighted by News September 30, 2010.